The Silk Factory
By: Judith Allnatt
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Published: 2015
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 400
ISBN-13: 9780007522989; 9780007522996
Subjects: Family secrets; Death; Mothers; Memories; Fiction; Mills and mill-work; Homecoming; History
Description: The story of a young mother who discovers old buried secrets as she goes through her mother's things, all whilst staying in a cottage that centuries before was a silk factory. A beautiful, eerie story of love and memory. If you try to pick up the pieces, sometimes that's when they fall into place When young mother Rosie gets the news that her mother has died she decides to take her two children, leave London and her soon-to-be ex-husband, and head home to the tiny village in Northamptonshire. Carefully picking through her mother's things she tries not to scare the children with her tears. Until one piece of paper stops her in her tracks and sets in motion a reawakening of memories long since forgotten. And when Rosie starts to see things she believes the stress must be getting to her at last. In the same village two centuries earlier, Effie, Beulah and Tobias struggle to survive. Huddled together by an empty hearth as Beulah and Tobias's wages from the silk factory are docked again, Effie, the eldest, wonders how she will keep them out of the workhouse. Just as Beulah starts getting under the skin of the silk factory master, Effie's heart is captured by young a soldier in a fine red coat, Lieutenant Jack Stamford. And when he proposes to her and promises to dress her in the very silk her brother and sister make, it's a promise she hopes might change their lives forever. The thread that weaves these two stories together is as strong as the foundation of the cottage that has seen these very lives pass through it. The Silk Factory is a story of love, loss, and the memories that bind us.